Wolfgang Scheffler (historian)

Wolfgang Scheffler ( born July 22, 1929 in Leipzig, † November 18, 2008 in Berlin) was a German political scientist and historian, who has emerged especially with research on the Holocaust.

Life

Wolfgang Scheffler was born in 1929 in Leipzig as a child of Protestant parents. In terms of the values ​​of the Confessing Church educated, were he and his family. Their distance to National Socialism In 1950 he went to West Berlin to study at the Free University, where he graduated in 1956 with a dissertation on parliamentarians diets.

But his real subject was the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich. In 1960 he published a pamphlet on the subject of Jewish persecution. This publication has been repeatedly issued new in supplemented form and disseminated by several national centers for civic education in large numbers in schools and in public. 1961 Scheffler was sent by the Foreign Office as a scientific observer on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In 1965, he joined as a historical expert on in Nazi trials. His most notable cases were the Treblinka proceedings before the Regional Court Dusseldorf, the trial of the State Railroad State Secretary Albert Ganzenmüller and the trial of John Demjanjuk.

Since the 70s Scheffler taught as a lecturer at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin. In 1986 he was a professor at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Because of his scientific contributions and the support of various commemorative projects ( "Topography of Terror" Memorial " House of the Wannsee Conference" ) Scheffler has been variously referred to as " the doyen of German Holocaust research ".

For a fierce public dispute Scheffler with members of survivors of the ghetto Riga, represented by the association " Jewish Survivors of Latvia " in New York, it came in the late nineties. A 1992 study commissioned Scheffler on the fate of the Jews in Latvia was delayed due to illness, and by organizational problems again and again. Finally, the dispute ended in a court case. Its result was that the study did not Scheffler had to finish. In return he paid all advances received back in full. Published in 2003, the now retired Scheffler together with his colleague Diana Schulle a two-volume documentary about the Baltic States deported Jews from Germany, Austria and the former Czechoslovakia under the title Book of Remembrance. (see "Works ").

Wolfgang Scheffler had been married to his second wife with the Hamburg senior public prosecutor, Helge Grabitz, who worked as a detective in Nazi trials and died in 2003. Scheffler died in November 2008 at the age of 79 years in Berlin.

Works (excerpt)

  • Persecution of Jews in the Third Reich, Berlin ( Colloquium Verlag), 1960.
  • Persecution of Jews in the Third Reich. Amended and new edition, revised, Berlin ( Colloquium Verlag ), 1964 [ last: Berlin 1990].
  • Wolfgang Scheffler: Reinhard Heydrich. In: New German Biography ( NDB ). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7, pp. 73 f ( digitized ).
  • Wolfgang Scheffler: Himmler, Heinrich. In: New German Biography ( NDB ). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7, pp. 172-175 ( digitized ).
  • Helge Grabitz / Wolfgang Scheffler: Last traces. Warsaw Ghetto, SS Trawniki labor camp, harvest festival. Photos and documents about victims of Endlösungswahns in the mirror of historical events, Berlin ( Ed. Hentrich ), 1988.
  • Wolfgang Scheffler / Helge Grabitz: The Ghetto Uprising Warsaw 1943 from the perspective of the perpetrators and victims in testimony before German courts, Munich ( Goldmann ) in 1993.
  • Helge Grabitz judicial authority Hamburg ( ed.): perpetrators and agents of the Endlösungswahns. Hamburger proceedings for Nazi Crimes 1946-1996, Hamburg ( results Verlag) 1999 ( ISBN 3- 87916-049 -X) [ Appendix pp. 163-272 published senior public prosecutor Grabitz four important historical time judicial opinions in Wolfgang Scheffler ).
  • Wolfgang Scheffler and Diana Schulle: Book of Memories: the deportees to the Baltic German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews. Published by the " German War Graves Commission " and the "Riga Committee of German cities " together with the foundation " New Synagogue Berlin - Centrum Judaicum " and the memorial " House of the Wannsee Conference". 2 volumes Munich 2003, ISBN 3-598-11618-7 (see the review in HSK).
Adolf Eichmann#Trial Riga Ghetto Neue Deutsche Biographie Name Authority File
828129
de